The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (96 page)

Constable Hall and a doctor came later, after it was dark. The doctor’s hasty examination led to nothing more than a general impression that Miss Wright, being thrown from her bicycle, had fractured her skull on a stone. Cowell’s statement as to his discovery of the body seems to have been accepted as quite satisfactory. This was due, I suppose, to his good reputation, since the only witnesses he could call to prove his story were his cows.

Miss Wright’s body rested that night in a cottage nearby. Early next morning Constable Hall decided to make further investigation. He carefully examined the road; and seventeen feet from the bloodstain which marked the spot where the girl’s head had lain in the dust he found a bullet, caliber .45, partly embedded in the road as if it had been stepped on or run over.

He made another exceedingly curious discovery: the gate which led into the field was painted white, and on the top bar were marks of claws—marks in blood. There were tracks of these claws, also in blood—twelve such sets of tracks, six going and six returning—leading from the body to the gate. In the field the constable came across a large bird with black plumage—dead. This bird was found to be gorged with blood. Indeed, that surfeit of blood was supposed to have killed it.

In England everybody is keen about birds and their habits. As soon as the Leicester police said that this bird was a raven, other folk flew to the defense of ravens. They said that (
a
) there were no ravens around Leicester; and (
b
) if there were, they had never been known to drink blood.

(The bird of which the Book of Job says “Her young ones also suck up blood” is not the raven but the eagle.)

This creature, said the bird experts, must be a rook or a carrion crow.

Whatever bird it was, there are two schools of thought about it, and all the authorities, Messrs H. R. Wakefield, Edward Marjoribanks, and others, have discussed it. There are the severely practical ones, who think that the raven (or rook) had no connection with the death of Bella Wright; and there are the romantics, who believe there was a very close connection.

At all events, how did the bird obtain so much blood from the poor dead or dying girl as to cause its own death? Was that really the cause of its death? How did it chance to be in that vicinity at the moment? Since the body is supposed to have been found within a few minutes of death, how was there time for all this gruesome feasting and tracking back and forth from road to gate?

Let’s return now to Constable Hall and the bullet. He and the doctor made another examination of the body. After the blood had been washed from the girl’s face, they found a small bullet wound one inch below the left eye, and another slightly larger, the mark of the exit of the bullet, in her hair. Thus it seemed that this heavy bullet had passed through the girl’s head, yet had gone no farther than seventeen feet from her!

At all events, this was murder; and it was the duty of the police to inquire where she had been, and with whom, between six thirty and nine twenty of that summer evening—daylight all the time.

At seven thirty she had ridden up to the cottage of her uncle, Mr Measures, in Gaulby. Calling on Measures at the time was his son-in-law, a man named Evans. So both of them were important witnesses to her arrival and departure. With her, when she came, was another cyclist, a young man. Bella Wright went in, leaving the young man outside. She remarked that he was “a perfect stranger”, and added:

“Perhaps if I wait a while he will be gone.”

Yet she did not ask her uncle to drive him away, as if he were objectionable. And when, an hour or more later, they came out again, the young man was still there—having either returned or waited. This time, he greeted her, so said Measures and Evans, with the remark:

“Bella, you
have
been a long time. I thought you had gone the other way.”

Evans had some friendly conversation with the stranger about his bicycle. And finally, the girl and the young man pedalled away together—at, say, eight-forty. Forty minutes later, or thereabouts, Cowell, the farmer, was finding Bella’s dead body in the Gartree Road.

Now, as the reader has noticed, there are some contradictions in this. If the man was “a perfect stranger”, how had he progressed so far as to call her Bella? This has been answered by the statement that what he really said was “Hello!” And that certainly goes more reasonably with the rest of his remark.

How is this for an explanation of the incident? That he was a stranger, as she said, who had joined her as she rode along; and that, while his company was perfectly tolerable to her, she had offered a little tribute to strict propriety when she said to her uncle that if she waited around a bit he would go away. Girls do not, today—if they ever did—scream and say, “Sir, I have never met you!” when a presentable stranger starts conversation, while riding along a country road. They may welcome it, or they may simply bear it, not wishing to make a fuss, and knowing that, in most cases, the man will soon go away without becoming an annoyance.

Measures and Evans had had a good look at this man and his cycle, and so in a few days the police were offering a reward for a man of thirty-five, about five feet seven to nine inches in height, hair turning grey, and with rather a high-pitched voice. They gave a description of his clothes and various other particulars.

The notable thing was that he rode
a green bicycle
.

And for the next few months each man in Leicestershire unfortunate enough to own a green bicycle wished to heaven that he had never bought it. After he had satisfied the police as to where he had been on that July evening, he had to encounter the jeering remarks of his friends as to his diversions and his murderous disposition.

But the man really sought—the last man alive with Miss Wright—was not so easily discovered. Scotland Yard had a try at it, but could do nothing with the murder, the missing green bicycle, or the dead raven.

Half a year went by, and Bella Wright had long been lying in the churchyard, past which she rode that evening. Then, one day in February, something happened: a most peculiar chance, which, for a time, probably revived faith in the ancient falsehood, “Murder will out.”

A canal boat was passing through Leicester, carrying a load of coal to the rubber works where the dead girl had been employed. A boatman named Whitehouse was idly watching his towrope when he saw it slacken down into the water and then tighten. As it became taut it brought up part of a bicycle, which hung in plain sight for a moment—long enough to change the whole current of a man’s life—then slipped back into the water. Whitehouse had not forgotten all those police advertisements and the reward: he came back next day and dragged the canal. He hauled up the bicycle frame again, and, as he hoped, it was green.

The police were soon busy—dragging the canal for other interesting objects and examining the one the boatman had found. From the canal they fished other parts of the machine; also a revolver holster with twelve ball and seven blank cartridges in it.

The green bicycle was of a special model, made in Birmingham, and from it the name and number plate and other identifying marks had carefully been removed. But, in an obscure place, was found the number 103,648—and this was the number of a bicycle sold years before to a Mr Ronald Vivian Light.

This gentleman was found teaching mathematics at a school in Cheltenham. He was a good-looking, rather earnest man; a little prematurely old in appearance, possibly as a result of his experiences in the war. He was a Rugby School boy; a civil engineer, who had served four years in France, part of the time with an officer’s commission. Shell-shocked and slightly deaf since the great German attack in 1918, he had been discharged in 1919. For about a year thereafter (the year 1919, in the summer of which Miss Wright was killed) he had been out of work and living in Leicester with his mother. His present position dated only from January, 1920, the month before the discovery of the green bicycle.

Invited by a police inspector to explain how the fragments of his bicycle happened to be at the bottom of the canal, Mr Light proceeded to tell a pack of lies. He said he had never owned a green bicycle; he had never seen Bella Wright; he had never been in the village of Gaulby—certainly not on that crucial evening last July.

Naturally, there was nothing to do but arrest him—especially as Bella’s uncle, Mr Measures, and Evans also, positively identified him as the mysterious man who rode away with her so shortly before the murder. And two little girls, Muriel Nunney, aged fourteen, and Valeria Caven, twelve, believed they recognized him as a man who had followed and frightened them, about five thirty on the day of the murder, and in the same vicinity. They remembered this many months after the event. Some of the cartridges, by the way, found in the holster suspiciously near the sunken bicycle, had bullets like the one found in the road. But of course Mr Light denied the holster as firmly as he did all the other relics.

Now, here was a beautiful case of circumstantial evidence. The net was drawn tight around the poor young man, who would, of course, be convicted—as in the detective novels.

About three months after his arrest, Ronald Light was placed on trial. The Attorney General stated the case against the prisoner in all its deadly detail. He began to prove by his witnesses that the bicycle belonged to Light; that he was with the girl shortly before her death; that he had concealed evidence, and lied about it, over and over again.

In the middle of this testimony, the prisoner’s counsel quietly interrupted. This was Sir Edward Marshall Hall—the famous defender of accused persons, for whom everybody sent in time of great trouble. Sir Edward courteously intimated that the learned Attorney General was going to unnecessary pains. He need not prove that the bicycle belonged to the prisoner; they admitted it. He need not prove that his client rode up to Mr Measures’s house that evening, with Bella Wright; they admitted that. Most of the Crown witnesses would not be cross-examined by the defense; only one or two points did they deny.

The Attorney General and the police were probably somewhat disgusted. Here was the defense conceding three quarters of the case at the outset. What about the other quarter?

Sir Edward denied, and his client would deny, that his client had used the name “Bella”. He had said “Hello”. And Sir Edward took in hand, very kindly and gently, the two little girls, who said they had met Ronald Light near the scene of the murder, and who described him going about the lanes seeking to molest unprotected damsels.

When he got through with Miss Muriel and Miss Valieria, they no longer looked like two little angels of justice, but rather more like two busy little brats who, feeding for months on sensational newspapers and pictures, had suddenly begun to remember something which
might
have happened to them on some day or other—but which they obligingly fixed for a
certain
day, after the police had suggested the date.

At the end of the trial the judge advised the jury not to trouble themselves at all with the testimony of Miss Muriel and Miss Valeria.

When he began to present his case, Sir Edward played his ace. He called the prisoner to the witness stand. Ronald Light was serious, calm, and dignified. He was what we call “a shell-shocked veteran”, who had, moreover, become partially deaf as the result of an exploding shell. There was no attempt to emphasize Light’s wartime services, except in so far as his shattered nerves might explain some of his conduct.

Light now testified that he had never had a revolver or pistol since he had been sent home from France on a stretcher. On the evening of the murder he left home at about five forty-five for a bicycle ride, expecting to return at eight o’clock. He rode through Gaulby, a district he did not know very well, and at six forty-five he was near a place called Little Stretton. He did not see the two small girls anywhere. As it was still early, he turned about to go home by the long route, and this led him again toward Gaulby.

He met a girl, who was a stranger to him, standing at the roadside examining her bicycle. She asked if he had a wrench. He had not, but he looked at the front wheel, which seemed merely to wobble a little. There was nothing he could do for it. They rode on together, chattering as they went. She said that she was going to see some friends in Gaulby, and added:

“I shall only be ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.”

Light then testified:

“I took that as a sort of suggestion that I should wait and we should ride back together. I waited for ten minutes or more, then walked my machine up the hill to the church. Here I got on the bicycle to ride back to Leicester, when I found the rear tyre flat. I pumped it up, and sat down on a gate; but the tyre went down again and I had to mend the puncture. By this time it was eight fifteen, and I knew I was late anyhow. I thought I would ride back and see if this girl had come out. She came out the gate as I rode along, and I said, ‘Hello, you’ve been a long time. I thought you’d gone the other way.’ I talked with Evans, and all that he says is correct, except that I did not say ‘Bella’.”

He further testified that they rode together for only about ten minutes; that he had still more trouble with his tyre; and that the girl left him at a crossroads. He kept on the upper or more direct road; she took the lower, the Gartree Road. He had to walk nearly all the way home and did not arrive till nearly ten. On the following Tuesday he heard of the death. He read the description of Bella Wright and of his own bicycle and came to the conclusion that he was the man wanted.